Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield and his company Tiny Speck have come out today with a game they boldly assert could be "the greatest game there ever was". The massively-multiplayer, Web-based Flash game was unveiled this morning and will be opening for private alpha testing soon.
While the game will not be fully open to the public until late in 2010, the current site not only gives us a preview of what Tiny Speck has been working on, but offers a way for you to keep track of what's new and sign up to be one of the game's testers.
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This morning, Google is announcing some exciting new features for two of its most popular applications.
Team Red, as we affectionately call ourselves, is present at the Googleplex in Mountain View, and we'll be live blogging the event, giving you, dear reader, a fascinating play-by-play. Stay tuned for updates!
The event will begin at 10 a.m. Pacific time. Just refresh this post to see new content as events unfold.Additional on-the-fly research and images from RWW journalist Frederic Lardinois.
The talk of the venture capital and entrepreneurial towns these days is the Open Angel Forum which after its second event in Boulder, Colorado is now announcing two more events in New York and San Francisco. Brainchild of Jason Calacanis, the Open Angel Forum (OAF) is an opportunity for startups to get face-time with active big-time venture capitalists and angel investors - all for the low, low price of free.
Today Amazon Web Services announced the availability of a new feature of their Simple Storage Service (S3).
Object Versioning now joins the ever growing list of features supported by S3. This proves once again that Amazon Web Services are listening to their customers and putting plenty of distance between them and their competition.
Google Wave, the maddeningly confusing yet highly innovative real-time collaboration tool, will become a member of Google's online office suite Google Apps later this year. The service, still in closed beta, is meant to be a modern-day revamp of email - what email would be if it was invented in 2009 instead of the 1960's. Yet the interface, a mashup of email, chat, and collaborative document editing, left many early adopters with mixed feelings about the product...at least in its current form. Called "unproductive," "complex," and "overwhelming" by the same people who usually embrace new technologies, it seems an odd choice to add the still-developing Wave service to the Google Apps line-up at this time. But Google has confirmed they will do exactly that.
Last month, Google received high praise from human rights supporters after threatening to exit the Chinese search market, claiming it was no longer comfortable with censoring search results per government demands. But here it is a month later and Google has made no move to withdrawal its Chinese search operations, with censored results still appearing on Google's Chinese portal, Google.cn. In addition, the company may now be investing in a Chinese digital media company, as well. According to reports, the Internet giant is said to be a member of a Disney-led consortium looking to invest in a Chinese media and advertising company called Bus Online.
These days, the words "social media campaign" are on the lips of everyone around, from media professionals to small business owners to college students in coffee shops. While the idea of a social media campaign is becoming widespread, the tools to manage one are often left for the former, while the latter look in awe at the price.
ViralHeat, a social media analytics firm, hopes to fill the space left empty by other, far more expensive services.
From time to time, we look at how Enterprise 2.0 practices are reaching into companies.
A recent post by Michael Idinopulos demonstrates how the premises for finding Enterprise 2.0 champions is often flawed. Too often the search is for the right personality. Instead, the focus of the search should really be for the people who are "exchanging knowledge, information, and ideas across large parts of the organization."
Youth social networking researcher danah boyd has observed that many people presume the way they use social networks is the way everyone uses them. "I interviewed gay men who thought Friendster was a gay dating site because all they saw were other gay men," she says. "I interviewed teens who believed that everyone on MySpace was Christian because all of the profiles they saw contained biblical quotes. We all live in our own worlds with people who share our values and, with networked media, it's often hard to see beyond that."
Now picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird's-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. That's what a Ramen-eating, ex-Apple engineer named Pete Warden is about to release to the public this week.
If you've been a geek your whole life then you understand the term "Canadian girlfriend." The Canadian (or sometimes British) love interest is the person you talk about when a member of the opposite sex inquires about your dating status. The story is that you met online, you've formed a solid bond and you'll probably break up with your online girlfriend when a girl in your vicinity decides she likes you. The idea is to drive up the value of your perceived social stock. In the startup world, the same principle is used in "ham and egging."
Green Goose is a new financial management service that launched today, which connects sensor activity to your savings account. At first Green Goose sounded a little gimmicky. Using green Internet-connected eggs, it measures how much energy you expend on your bike or how much water you use in your shower - and transfers amounts from your checking account to your savings account based on the 'savings' you made doing those activities.
What's interesting though is that the savings are calculated based on the actions measured by small battery-powered, wireless sensors. You stick these sensors on your bike, thermostat, showerhead "and even your keychain."